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Tick Vaccine Reduces Lyme Transmission

August 4, 2023

Medical Xpress released an article “A vaccine that reduces ability of ticks to transmit Lyme disease bacteria” on 8.2.2023, written by Bob Yirka and Medical Xpress. The article focuses on a team of medical students and colleagues who have developed a type of vaccine to try and reduce the ability of ticks transmitting the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. This vaccine would be given to a host animal to prevent ticks from spreading the disease.

The vaccine works by infecting a host animal with an engineered harmless bacteria, causing a harmless infection to result in an antibody response in the host. The antibody was engineered to change the environment inside the tick to be inhabitable for the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. This vaccine would not make the host immune to Lyme disease, but rather would stop the tick that bit the host from further spreading Lyme disease to anyone else.

The article notes that the idea of this vaccine is that if enough people, livestock, or pets were vaccinated, eventually the number of infected ticks would be reduced, hopefully causing the bacteria that causes Lyme disease to be eliminated and therefore protect the human population as a whole. Researchers believe such a vaccine would reduce the cases of Lyme disease in areas with high numbers of infected ticks.

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Read the full article on the Medical Xpress website here.